A few weeks ago, I wrote about the cost of trying to look bulletproof. What happens next is what this post is about: what happens once you stop protecting the image and actually let yourself feel what’s been building underneath? If things have been feeling like they’re coming to a head lately – if…

  A few weeks ago, I made the case that heart beats mind when it comes to leadership that actually lasts. But knowing heart matters and knowing how to lead with it are two different things. So, what does it actually look like in practice? It starts with giving up something most leaders have been…

  Last time, I left off with a question: why does any of this – the suffering, the feeling, the processing – actually matter for the work you do all day? Here’s where it leads. If you get a group of leaders together and predict which of them over the next ten to twenty years will…

  Last time, I left you with a question: what happens once you stop resisting an emotion and actually let it move? Here’s what I’ve learned, mostly from doing this myself, imperfectly, over and over. An emotion, felt fully, doesn’t stay the same shape for long. It starts as a heavy feeling in your gut.…

    Someone I love is suffering. Which means I am suffering. As I’ve tried to navigate this most unpleasant experience, I’ve become aware of something: more people are suffering right now than I ever realized. Clients. Friends. Family. Neighbors. Strangers in passing. The next time you’re surrounded by people — in a meeting, at…

  A while back, I wrote about what it takes to become real — the question at the center of The Pinocchio Principle. The distance between how capable a leader appears and how alive they actually feel. Since then, I’ve been sitting with that question in a slightly different way. Because in the intervening years,…

  When I tell people I wrote a leadership book called The Pinocchio Principle, they usually assume it’s about honesty. It’s not. Or rather — it’s about a different kind of honesty. Not the honesty of telling the truth to others, but the far more difficult honesty of telling the truth to yourself. About who…

  Can you think of the last time you did something that terrified and excited you at the same time? If you’re like me, you can probably also think of a few times an opportunity like that revealed itself — and you let it pass by. We tell ourselves we’re not ready. We succumb to…

  There’s a particular trap that almost exclusively catches high achievers. It doesn’t catch the mediocre or the disengaged — they’re nowhere near it. It catches the capable, the accomplished, the ones who have built real expertise and a track record of results. It goes like this: you get good at something. Genuinely good. People…

My family spent two days at Disneyland. I spent most of it somewhere else entirely. Not physically — I was there. I stood in the lines, rode the rides, ate the overpriced food. But mentally, I was somewhere between a client situation I hadn’t fully resolved and a project that was nagging at me. I…